Main Menu

Success Stories

Achtzehn Hochhäuser in Wels by Karl Hoedl

Photographer and participant of the AnzenbergerMasterclass 2014/15 Karl Hoedl about his publication Achtzehn Hochhäuser in Wels:

“Following the idea of Ed Ruscha’s Some Los Angeles Apartments and Twenty Six Gasoline Stations, I have captured Eighteen High Rise Buildings in Wels. But I followed an opposite approach. My objective was to capture the hype in the late 1950s to build high-rise buildings even in small cities like Wels as a proof of wealth and modernism. Nowadays there is a lot of criticism and polarization when it comes to the construction of such buildings in city centres.
At the same time, the residents of the high-rise buildings in Wels are no longer aware of them living in high-rise buildings, for them it’s like every other building in town.
In my book I have captured the high rise buildings in a way you normally wouldn’t perceive them, so that residents looking at these images usually say something like, “I know this building, but I’ve never seen it like that”. I have turned their unconscious perception of the houses in a conscious one again.”

Karl Hoedl about the AnzenbergerMasterclass: “You have an idea and a story to tell, but is it good enough for a book? I didn’t have a book on my mind when I started my project four years ago, but during the Masterclass and thanks to Regina, Andrew, Reiner, Klaus and Anette, it became very obvious that I have to do it. During the Masterclass I gathered the needed contacts and insight to finally publish my project in a book. And if you did it once you might not stop, so my next book is already in preparation.”

Together with Elisabeth Steiner photographer and participant oft the AnzenbergerMasterclass 15/16 Gerhard Maurer published his photobook Fremdenzimmer:

An ancient house in Weitensfeld (Carinthia/Austria), that had been an inn for many decades, has become the new home for around twenty refugees – mainly young men from Syria, waiting for a decision on their asylum. Every day, they get new messages: photos of horrible war scenarios, sent by friends or family members who are still in their home country. Stranded in the rural environment of Weitensfeld, their future is insecure. Will their hopes and dreams of a new, more solid and safer life come true?
Within a period of more than a year, photographer Gerhard Maurer visited the refugee hostel “Bärenwirt” in Weitensfeld, that is led by former journalist Elisabeth Steiner who opened the hostel with the intention to create not only a venue for refugees but also for residents, many times. At his visits, he documented a house that cannot remain a home for those who live there. The photographs show the hostel and its environment as a transit lounge and tell a story that is likewise one about strangeness as well as intimacy.

The Kreta Kollektiv evolved from the first AnzenbergerMasterclass 2014/15. The photographers are: Sonja Bachmayer, Simon Brugner, Thomas Bundschuh, Georg Herder, Karl Hödl, Ritchy Pobaschnig, Karola Riegler, Thomas Steinbichler and Georg Zinsler. Together they published their photobook KRETALABOR, which was one of five chosen and promoted projects by the ViennaDesignWeek:

Fotolabor Kreta photographed the images during the Vienna Design Week in 2015. KRETALABOR was a pop-up photo studio run by Kreta Kollektiv for 10 days near Reumannplatz in Vienna’s 10th district. It reflects the diversity of the population of a big city like Vienna. And they are connected to historical clippings of the individual CVs of some of its inhabitants, a spectrum of all the components of identity and what the city is today.
“These photos literally show human effigies – you see the most unique in its diversity, namely in its individual identity. And at the same time you always see the general, the reconnecting, what we all have in common: the pride, the hope, the defiance, the longing. We see all this large conceptional notions in the physiognomy, the body language and the attitude of these people. And that’s, ultimately, what it is all about: attitude. And these images capture attitude.” – Robert Menasse

Photographer and participant of the AnzenbergerMasterclass 2014/15 self-published his first book Silence Beyond The Wall.

A book about infrastructure. A book about configured landscape, a book about walls and what they do to us. Thomas Bundschuh has been travelling along the Austrian highways for weeks – mind you, on the outside – and has captured noise protection walls. How they shape the landscape, how they cut through the scenery and how they become self-drawn borders that narrow our horizon.

Combining original pics taken by the author during guided tours of Chernobyl with stills from thematically related movies and video games, G. Zinsler’s The Sentinel Script is a mysterious sci-fi tale and a metaphor of the increasingly nebulous boundary between reality and entertainment.
Deliberately referencing classic works of fiction such as Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers and Tarkovsky’s Stalker, as well as inspired by J. G. Ballard’s novel The Crystal World, The Sentinel Script plunges the reader into a multilayered narrative wormhole: while the images describe the activity of the visitors inside the elusive Zone, texts emerge like disruptive transmissions from another dimension, interfering with the visual sequence and its reading.The Sentinel Script is both a dystopian journey and a sarcastic reflection on the desensitization of our society.